Menu

from the Jensen Family – currently in sweden :-)

Open Source, Education and Software Development

Took some time off recently – to follow up on the blog and writings of Jon Udell – who is one of my favorite bloggers – writing for Infoworld.
The story of Graham Glass is inspirational – and a interesting view of the future of Open Source, Education and Software Development in general.

From the article:

Graham Glass wrote a blog entry this week that touched on two of my favorite themes: open source and education. In the middle of a project based on the red-hot Ruby on Rails platform, he took time out to explain how he found, and worked around, a Rails limitation. Digging down to the roots of the problem took six hours of investigation. Crafting the work-around took just six lines of code.

Glass is one of the more dynamic figures in the software world. At his first company, ObjectSpace, he created the Voyager object request broker. In his next venture, The Mind Electric, he created GLUE, a Web services toolkit, and GAIA, a services fabric. He became CTO of webMethods when it acquired The Mind Electric and then left to start yet another venture. This time he aims to bring much-needed software innovation to the world of education.

It says a lot for Ruby, the dynamic language that’s giving Perl and Python a run for their money, as well as for Rails, the application framework that made Ruby famous, that such a savvy software veteran would choose to bet his next business on these open source technologies. It says even more about the nature of the open source process, as well as the future of education, that he would not only propose an improvement to Ruby on Rails but also publish the analysis that led to his proposal.